Maybe somewhere in these quotes Doc Rivers blamed himself as well, but I haven’t seen that so far.
He blamed the roster and contracts initially, now he is blaming the Clippers lack of focus after beating the Spurs. Here are Doc’s quotes via Yahoo.
“We took too long to get over the intoxication of beating the Spurs,” Doc Rivers told Yahoo Sports late Sunday afternoon. “I never thought we gave Houston the same focus that we gave the Spurs. Even though we were up 3-1, I never felt that way.
“We stepped back instead of going forward.”
“Once the ball started rolling down the hill, we couldn’t stop it,” Rivers told Yahoo Sports. “And I thought the ball started rolling down the hill in Game 5. I thought that was the one game we just didn’t perform. It’s like we felt like we had something, like we had other games. I kept trying to get us to [understand], ‘We only have one home game.’
“It’s different when you’re up 3-1 with home-court advantage. Now, you have two home games. When you have one home game, you can’t [bleep] around with games.
“… They got a little confident and then obviously we had the Game 6 debacle.”
As the coach it is his job to make sure his team understands all that and not lose focus, so the problem seems to be as much Doc Rivers as the Clippers players.